The X-Axis – w/c 3 July 2023
I’m still on holiday, but time for a quick round-up of this week’s X-books anyway.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #94. By Jason Loo and Antonio Fabela. Okay, I see where this is meant to be going. Madrox wants to impress Reed Richards by showing how far he’s come since his debut in Giant-Size Fantastic Four – he conspicuously doesn’t care that much about the rest of the FF – but finds himself in a storyline involving his own evil renegade dupes. And those dupes are part of him, and therefore that’s embarrassing. I kind of get that, but there’s something a bit odd about positioning Reed as the paragon family-man that Madrox aspires to be – aside from the fact that he’s never come up before, Reed has always been defined more by his awkwardness in that role. Still, he is the patriarch of the MU’s top family-themed superhero team and I guess you could see how Madrox aspires to that… ish? There’s something in that angle, but the A plot with the dupes and Blastaar really isn’t doing much for me at all.
X-MEN #24. By Gerry Duggan, Joshua Cassara & Frank Martin. We’re firmly into the build for the Hellfire Gala now. Kid Cable returns to try and take down Orchis and change history, but gets nowhere. The kidnap of Manifold – which happened in Rogue and Gambit, a book that isn’t actually finished yet – is apparently a bigger deal than its positioning in that side series implied. Destiny tries to get Rogue to do something unspecified to avert something she can’t or won’t explain. Scott and Jean argue some more and Jean wants to leave the team; Jean talks to Polaris for some reason. Sunfire finally gets around to hunting for Redroot, which is apparently going to be an X-Men Unlimited arc.
And… for some reason none of that is the A-plot, which appears to be a fight with Pogg ur-Pogg on Gameworld? That doesn’t really seem to have much to go with anything else, and it only runs from pages 10 to 17. I’m happy enough to see the guy back, to see if we can do anything with him now that we’ve had the gag reveal that it’s a guy in a suit. But this feels decidedly pointless, unless it’s to give everyone an excuse to talk for a bit about mysterium, which hasn’t come up much in this book.
As an individual issue, it’s terribly scattershot. We’ll see if it all comes together as the Hellfire Gala hits.
X-MEN: BEFORE THE FALL – SINISTER FOUR #1. By Kieron Gillen, Paco Medina, Edgar Delgado & Fer Sifuentes Sujo. As with the Heralds of Apocalypse series, this is basically an issue of an ongoing series – Immortal X-Men – without the burden of having to include the regular cast. The focus here is on Dr Stasis and Mother Righteous, and a fuller exploration of the idea that she’s a re-creation of Essex’s beloved wife Rebecca.
There’s a lot going on here; Stasis is being positioned as the Sinister closest to the original Nathaniel Essex, because his whole thing is that he doesn’t change with time. Consequently, Stasis is immediately smitten by this re-creation of his ex-wife, and also struggling to account for the ways she’s changed. (“I’m sorry. It’s no longer the nineteenth century. I should respect your career goals.”) It’s basically an issue of conversation, but it does a massive amount to flesh out Stasis and actually humanise him somewhat as an echo of his long-dead creator. Medina’s art really sells him letting his guard down around Righteous, too. As for her, Rebecca Essex has previously served mainly to be disappointed in her husband in a handful of origin appearances; making her into an Eliza Doolittle figure adds a lot to her, and to their relationship. Very good.
X-23: DEADLY REGENESIS #5. By Erica Schultz, Edgar Salazar & Carlos Lopez. The final issue is much what you’d expect from the rest of the series: X-23 and Haymaker team up to rebel against Kimura and the Kingpin. The bad guys get away, and X-23 kind of learns a lesson about living with her past which was really part of her character anyway. The art’s a bit stiff in some of the action sequences, and and it winds up acting as if it was setting up Haymaker as a supporting character, which obviously he wasn’t. But it’s perfectly okay; if you want more of X-23 from this period of her continuity, well, it does what it says on the tin.
Reed’s presentation under Hickman (from his Fantastic Four run) would fit well with Jason Loo’s story, I assume.
Reed decides that family is more important than “solving everything” and realizes that it is flawed to even consider that position (unlike Nathaniel Richards). He finds himself at a crossroads where he can follow in his own father’s footsteps and, perhaps, accomplish something greater than his father, or he can decide to make the choices that his father refused.
There definitely wasn’t enough Pogg Ur-Pogg stuff to keep me interested for this issue. Rhyming gimmick got old pretty quickly and they already revealed he was just a guy in a big crocodile suit – but I guess he’s got Mysterium now? Design is great but he’s such a blank squib.
The conversations in X-Men were cool but could have been more of a focus, I get we have to have a fight-scene as a hook but if it had just been Jean & Scott having a barney that would have made for a better issue imo.
There is a flashback where Dr Stasis looms in the background of various super hero origin stories. Next page has a similar montage for Mother Righteous, it starts with Apocalypse, but does anyone know what the other stuff refers to?
Mother Righteous being busy:
Panel 1: Checking on Apocalypse during one of the periods when he’s asleep. It’s been retconned in recent years that he was always a powerful sorcerer.
Panel 2: Babysitting(?) for Wanda and Vision’s twins. Thus possibly setting some hooks into *two* of the most powerful magicians in the universe, Wanda and Billy. (The new Scarlet Witch book is written by Steve Orlando, late of Marauders. So possibly there will be some Krakoan tie-ins in one direction or other.)
Panel 3: Copying(?) the Darkhold, the Marvel equivalent of the Necronomicon. Or perhaps annotating a copy?
Panel 4: Meeting with Ogun? I don’t know enough of his history to narrow it down further. Is the mansion in the crystal ball meant to be the X-Mansion?
Bengt-The second picture features Mother Righteous reading bedtime stories to Scarlet Witch’s twin children sometime shortly after their birth at the end of the Vision & Scarlet Witch issue #12.
The third picture shows that Mother Righteous read the Darkhold while she had it in her possession during the Sins of Sinister crossover. She still has knowledge of reading the Darkhold.
The fourth picture features Belasco. I’m unsure if it pertains to any specific event or is just to show that Mother Righteous has some connection with Limbo.
Thanks.
I didn’t consider Wanda’s kids since Speed has white hair now, but apparently they had brown/red hair back in the day.
I don’t think the fourth matches either Belasco’s or Ogun’s standard appearance. Is there a specific comic where either sported this look?
I consider Madrox one of the most ill served characters since Rosenberg/Krakoa era. Background filler to be killed in comedy magnet? Whatever happened to his status quo, married to Layla? Where is she?
Could easily never have been explained but if it was, let me know!
…she’s in the story Paul comments on. She’s in Krakoa, they’re still married,they have a son.
@Evilgus : To their credit, Loo’s UNLIMITED stories have featured Layla ; she’s right here in this storyline (as the plot started up with Madrox inviting the FF for dinner at his home), and is duly part of the rescue party when Blastaar and the rogue dupes capture their son.
She’s not given much to do besides “Jamie’s wife who’s a bit fed up with his shit”, but she’s there.
Reed is a bad friend, and a *terrible* father and (in particular) husband, but I’ve always got the feeling that Marvel doesn’t fully realise that he is.
There are some vague gestures in that direction now and then, and Ultimate Reed is a sort of unconvincing exploration of it, but always at the end of the day Reed gets a pass.
It’s funny that Moira doesn’t trust Cable because he’s a creation of Essex but she’s working with Stasis.
I take we’re supposed to assume Moira knew about Cable’s base in the Rockies because she learned about it in one of her past lives but Kid Cable didn’t consider that.
Note that Destiny talks about a turncoat on the X-Men. Does she mean Colossus or someone else? Note that Hank had suspicions about Talon- maybe he was actually right for once.
Destiny talks about “kings clashing in white, black”- Tony Stark vs. Shaw?
Note that Destiny talks of “the false captain, his rank earned”. That would seem to be point to Captain Krakoa being either US Agent or William Burnside since they were both Captain America.
Illyana’s mysterium necklace makes no sense. In a recent issue of Dr. Strange, Jean gives Strange mysterium to help Strange free a man possessed by Dormammu but Strange realizes that as long as he holds the mysterium his spells are weakened as well. The man momentarily regains his free will and Strange tells him to grab the mysterium, which drives Dormammu out of his body. So shouldn’t Illyana’s magic have been weakened by the necklace? And if it wasn’t because she was wearing it as a necklace, then why didn’t Strange wear the mysterium as a necklace?
Note that in Dark Web, Jean specifically says she gave Maddie memories of Kid Cable. I suspect this will come into play.
So Jean argued with Scott over leaving the X-Men, just like Maddie did. And that’s why Scott was distracted during his battle with Captain Krakoa, just like he was distracted during his battle with Storm in the Danger Room. Only Captain Krakoa was a real, dangerous super-villain.
I think the problem with X-Men is that Duggan has been forced to spend time setting up arcs in other books over the last three issues. The Wolverine Sentinels are apparently going to appear in X=Force. the scene between Scott and Emma apparently sets up Fallen Friend, the scenes with Illyana’s powers being sabotaged sets up Realm of X, the scenes between Stasis and Righteous last issue set up Sinister Four and this issue sets up Sunfire’s plot in X-Men Unlimited.
I think there’s a valid question as to if Cable existed or travelled back in time in order for Moira to have met him from any of her past lives.
Life Four is the only one where it would have been possible for events to have occurred as they did in the current Marvel Universe. So, ok, it is possible that Moira could have known this information from that lifetime.
However, Moira was driven by the knowledge that mutants “always lose”. Except, Cable comes from a future where Apocalypse was victorious. His reason for returning to the past is to stop Apocalypse. That sort of contradicts Moira’s belief gained over nine past lives. If Moira hadn’t been killed in her fourth life, based on Cable’s existence, wouldn’t Moira have concluded that mutants would have eventually been victorious in that lifetime’s future? So, Moira was the sole cause of mutants losing in life four. Then, the world where mutants did rule was a nightmarish existence, one which Cable wanted to prevent from existing.
Cable’s existence doesn’t fit with the story Hickman was telling with Moira. Hickman’s version of the Marvel Universe was one where alternate futures didn’t seem to exist. Yet, Hickman used Cable during his run on X-Men without addressing these contradictions.
@Chris V- the whole “mutants always lose” idea never really made sense. First, Moira said that she was a school teacher in her first life, died of old age and never heard of mutants. You’d think that if there were massive murders of millions of mutants, she would have heard of them, just like most teachers in the 90s remember Rwanda. Second, Karma’s timeline was one where mutants won. Gillen tried to cover for this by having Sinister point out that only a poor scientist draws conclusions from a sample size of 10.
There were easy ways around this by Hickman. It could have been revealed that Moira was a liar. She knew she had either ten or eleven lives from Destiny, so she played the long game. She sabotaged events in each lifetime to make sure that mutants would not win. It was done in such a subtle way that it would never occur to Destiny that Moira was going against her orders from Life Three. Moira’s real goal was to make sure that mutants did not win, and she could bring up Cable’s future as a reason for why she knew that a world ruled by mutants would be a nightmare. After the revelations of the Librarian from Life Six, she also knew that she did not want the Machines to be victorious. Her goal in her first nine lives was to try to find out a way to manipulate mutants (getting close to Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse) and to figure out a way to stop the rise of the Machines.
Intriguingly, this would put her in the same position as Stasis.
@thekelvingreen
Reed Richard is all that? We must be talking about very different characters. He is about as straight an arrow as they come.
“Stasis is being positioned as the Sinister closest to the original Nathaniel Essex, because his whole thing is that he doesn’t change with time. ”
Note however that Sinister ALSO claimed that he was the Sinister closest to the original Nathaniel Essex because the original Nathaniel Essex was obsessed with mutants.
It’s also interesting that Stasis claims he doesn’t change with time but he wants to become a Dominion, which of course involves change.
So how much of Mother Righteous is Rebecca and how much is Nathaniel Essex?On the one hand Stasis points out their similarities- their love of stories, of crushed flowers. But on the other hand, many of her character traits are Nathaniel’s- her manipulativeness, her obsession with becoming a Dominion. She even created a magical chimera of sorts- the trickster- and she planned to use a Summers child in her final spell in Sins of Sinister. It’s worth noting that Mother Righteous describes Nathaniel creating her so she could have ” a life guided by my needs and interests, not his” but we’ve seen that she was just a means to his end- creating a Dominion.
It would have been nice if we got an explanation as to why Stasis and Mother Righteous have white and red skin and haven’t aged but Stellaris has normal skin and has aged. Mother Righteous claims Nathaniel created her as a literal scarlet woman but a scarlet woman is a prostitute.
It’s nice that Stasis has weaponized the powers of non-mutant superhumans just like Sinister weaponized the powers of mutants. But what does a Sinister six-shooter do? How can Kraven’s powers used in a gun?
So now Selene is working for Orchis. Presumably they found out about her through their association with Coven Akkaba. Note that Gillen referenced the events of Necrosha in Immortal X-Men 1 and the solicits for Dark X-Men 2 read “the fallen now rise against them”. So presumably Selene is one of the villains of Dark X-Men and she’s going to be reanimating the dead mutants. (I have a feeling Alex is going to be turned into a zombie for a few issues,)
It’s nice to see Stasis actually making clear that he fears machines as a threat to mankind as much as he fears mutants.
Can someone tell me what the point of the Mutant First Strike one-shot was? All of the other one-shots actually advanced the plot. Sons of X featured Nightcrawler resigning from the Council and Blindfold leaving so that Destiny was the only precog the Krakoans could rely on- both of which had disastrous results.Heralds of Apocalypse showed that Genesis wasn’t the innocent victim of Annihilation that she appeared to be and established that Apocalypse plans to both aid and oppose her. Sinister Four established who’s working with who- Selene was working for Orchis, Mother Righteous is working with but not part of Orchis and unbeknownst to everyone else, Stasis is working with Orbis Stellaris. But Mutant First Strike was just Orchis attacking a town and framing mutants and the X-Men responding. It seemed like a story Orlando wanted to do in Marauders but never got the chance to.
@Luis Dantas- There’s good reason many readers regard Reed as shady. The accident that gave the FF their powers was a result of Reed not listening to people he thought were less intelligent than him. During the ’60’s he would routinely say things like “Wives should be seen and not heard” and “You’re not a fool, Sue, just a female”. During the ’80’s he withheld from Ben evidence that his inability to be cured might be psychosomatic. In Power Pack, we saw that his actions left Franklin with the impression that Reed hated and feared his powers. He engaged in all sorts of shady stuff with the Illuminati. He helped create a clone of Thor that killed Bill Foster.
I don’t know that Mutants First Strike had an overall important place in the Fall of X stuff, but I’m perfectly fine with using one shots like these to tell a self-contained story and not just be “here is another issue of the book you usually read but with more pages.”
It’s interesting that Reed is positioned as the epitome of the “American can-do” spirit, not letting anyone stand in his way, leading to a fortuitous accident, as the FF became heroes who saved the world countless times thanks to their powers. He was proven right in a roundabout way for deciding he knew best.
Meanwhile, Doom is portrayed as an egomaniac who refused to listen to his betters due to his own belief that no one knew better than him. Which led to the tragic accident which disfigured him, leading to his bitterness against Reed and the world, as his scars showed everyone that he wasn’t superior to every other human.
Two sides of the same coin, indeed.
I also don’t understand this idea that “Stasis doesn’t change with time”. I mean, other than his name. He is involved in the creation of post-humanity, which is based in the very notion of change. The core idea is based in controlled technological change and is the evolution of baseline humanity. It takes evolution out of the state of nature (mutants), but is still about the evolution of the species, and yes, the endgame is the creation of a Dominion, the end-state of all evolution.
One thing to note- we wondered why Sinister’s Moiras failed to detect that Selene would attack upon being refused membership on the Quiet Council. I think we have our answer. Selene’s death was a major part of the interactions between Mother Righteous and Stasis, which he later discussed with Orbis. In other words, Selene’s death had to happen for the specific interaction between the three Sinisters to happen. The Dominion blocked Sinister from detecting Selene’s attack because it needed Selene to die to insure that its interactions with the other Sinisters happened as it remembered them and to ensure that it became the Dominion. The question is – which of them is the Dominion?
After thinking about it for approximately 39 seconds, I have concluded that the Sinister Six gun does the following:
The Electro setting shoots electricity. Congratulations Stasis, you have a taser.
The Mysterio setting shoots bullets… ILLUSIONARY BULLETS!!! Stasis doesn’t use it very often.
The Vulture setting gets the nearest kids off the nearest lawn, but it can be thwarted by modern cellphones.
The Sandman setting shoots sand, which is coarse and irritating and gets everywhere.
The Kraven setting replaces the targets’ clothes with lion head vests and cheetah print pants so they die from embarrassment.
The Doctor Octopus setting gives the target the hots for Aunt May.
Do we know it is actually based on weaponized members of the Sinister Six? I thought it was just a pun. A six-shooter is a revolver with six chambers. We knew Essex as Mr. Sinister. The Sinister Six is a thing in the Marvel U. “Sinister Six Shooter”. That was how I read it. I did read this comic, but I don’t remember if he specifically mentioned the gun was somehow based on the powers of the Sinister Six.
Wow. I would never have guessed there is so much vitriol against Reed. Let alone in a community dedicated to such shady characters as those of the current form of X-books.
Re: Essex and his clones, I am not sure it is really possible to talk about a core personality for a person that has demonstrably created variants of itself and lived through centuries. People are not that constant under any circunstances.
Similarly, I don’t think Moira’s powers can be made sense of without either making her truly an universe changer (which would mean irreparable changes to the status quo of characters such as Cable and Rachel for starters) or instead quietly establishing that her true power is true reincarnation inside a closed time loop. Or to put it another way, her true power is involuntary and heavily restricted travel among alternate realities. Were I the writer I would make her aware of that but in deep denial. For all I know Marvel is doing just that.
I think the reason Jean and Scott’s fight is weird is that they’re both proceeding from the belief that they’re different-better-than normal humans, that they are indeed of a superior racial group, and I fundamentally do not buy that. I don’t think that mutants are ethically or morally different from the average person and when fictional white people talk like the way Jean and Scott do I am primed to read them as obvious bigots.
But I don’t think that Gerry Duggan is writing Jean and Scott with the assumption that they are racists. I think he’s genuinely writing them as belonging to a superior race of morally better people, which is repugnant, but makes the argument make more sense-their racist and paternalistic positions of “we should help these poor inferior people, who are consumed with bigotry in a way we are clearly, as the morally superior race, immune to” and “Scott you have been corrupted by your association with these lesser races, you must remember that we are not them, thinking like them is your great flaw, they are to be loved from a distance and we must not sully ourselves with them” are meant to be understandable and sympathetic.
It doesn’t really change the status quo of Cable or Rachel, except to expect that both characters probably only existed in Moira’s current life.
The idea with Cable is that the future of Earth-616 was moving in the direction of Cable’s future, until he travelled back in time. At which point, the future was changed and that Earth splintered off becoming an alternate timeline. Hence, Moira wouldn’t have changed anything about Cable.
The same is true about Rachel. Claremont intended that the “Days of Future Past” was Earth-616’s true future until the X-Men saved Senator Kelly due to time travel shenanigans. At that point, it also splintered off, becoming an alternate timeline. Claremont did hint that the world seen in “Days of Future Past” may still be Earth-616’s future, but it wouldn’t be the exact same one from which Rachel came to our time.
Cable and Rachel came from possible futures of Moira’s Life Ten. So, nothing from Moira’s past lives would affect Cable or Rachel’s status quo.
The biggest problem with Cable vis-a-vis Moira is simply that he did originally come from a future where mutants won.
It is possible that Nathan Summers did exist in Moira’s Life Four also, but that would be an alternate Cable whose future, based on the events of the Earth-616 Life Four timeline, would have been erased when Moira died.
I’m sure, just like the AOA, Marvel will make Moira’s past lives into alternate realities at some point in the future and create mega-events based on them.
I think it is sort of baked into the premise that the next stage in human evolution, which is what mutants we’re supposed to be, would be superior to Homo Sapiens Sapiens. It’s very true that Hickman was writing mutants as a different species, rather than as a metaphor for minorities in society.
However, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar (in UXM), and Hickman did all challenge this assumption that “what comes next must necessarily be better”. Morrison posited that cooperation rather than competition was the true route to a better future, and that the base assumption that the future would be better because of nature was completely flawed. Millar looked at the fact that mutants were supposedly “superior”, but yet all mutants do is fight with each other, positing the idea that evolution, on its own terms, only means more and greater violence. Hickman looked at the idea of what it would mean for “mutants to win” and it looked as dystopian and bleak as the futures where mutants lose.
The ideology of Krakoa has been that mutants were superior and better, but Hickman was undermining the propaganda that mutants are inherently different than humans. Writers like Duggan and Howard seemed to embrace the idea though.
@Chris V- forget Life Four for a second. The problem is that there’s no way that Moira didn’t know in her CURRENT LIFE that Cable came from a future where mutants won. She was trying to cure the Legacy Virus and was even infected with it for a time, so it makes no sense not to tell her that the Virus came from a future ruled by Apocalypse. And yet for some reason she refused to abandon her conviction that mutants always lose.
(The real reason is that Hickman has said that Moira wasn’t supposed to turn traitor originally, at least not this way. But the “mutants always lose” idea never made any sense,)
@ChrisV- The dialogue reads “Six specialized rounds, inspired and derived from those Spider-foe ragamuffins. First, an Electro-blast will…”
I believe the Moira working to cure and infected with the Legacy Virus was the Shi’ar golem. Moira being the only non-mutant infected by the Legacy Virus would (ironically) still hold true, as the golem didn’t have the X-gene. Perhaps the true Moira was never informed about the origin of the Legacy Virus by Xavier.
Of course, from Cable -1, we know that Moira was the first person Cable met after travelling back in time.
Geez, how could I forget the “ragamuffins” line.
Maybe Moira knew about Cable’s future, but doesn’t consider a totalitarian regime a true “win.” Or the fact that there was so much infighting between different mutant factions doesn’t make for a clean win. Or she’s seen it before, but further up that timeline AI revolts and takes over. Or it’s an alternate universe that had some key factors missing in 616. If this is a plot hole, it’s fixable.
On the subject of Reed Richards being shady, let’s not forget that FF vs the X-Men mini, where the X-Men went to Reed for help in curing Kitty Pryde, who at the time was slowly discorporating after being wounded in the Mutant Massacre.
A journal turned up which basically implied that Reed had deliberately caused the cosmic rays accident. While it was ultimately revealed to be a fake, courtesy of Doom (of course), there was just enough to instill some heavy self-doubt in Reed.
So yeah, the suggestion that maybe he consciously or subconsciously created the accident which spawned the FF has been around a while, enough to undermine his pure image.
Though he’s always been a science first! kind of guy, and prone to holding back information when he assumes other people can’t handle it, and he’s always doing experiments which end poorly. The multiversal gate leading to the Council of Reeds. Prison 42 (and the other ideas he pursued during the Civil War/Initiative era). A lot of the stuff he did leading up to Secret Wars. Decades worth of trying and failing to cure Ben.
And of course we live in a time where we’re more likely to distrust characters like Reed, Tony, the Hanks — as opposed to the 50s when Science!!! saved the day from giant monsters and alien invaders… (or Good Science!!! countered Science Gone Wrong!!!!!!).
Note that in the comic, it’s Madrox who treats Reed as the perfect father/husband/scientist, not the story itself. I’m pretty sure I remember Reed laughing at the suggestion, then Sue immediately mentioning that their kids are currently lost in time.
But yeah, like any serial character who’s been around for 60 years, Reed is sometimes written as a paragon, sometimes as a maggot. Every superheroine Stan Lee wrote, at least in the 60s, got the “little lady” treatment from her peers pretty much constantly.
As for the Sinister Six Shooter, I hope the pun reaches far enough to somehow be related to Jim Shooter or something. And the Kraven bullet probably injects jungle drugs into the system. Kraven was always roofying Spider-Man back in the day.
The internet is stagnating. Back in the 00s there would already be fanart of all six Sinister Six Shooter modes by the weekend.
Now I think Diamond Sinister actually becomes the Dominion after all. He just had to mislead his past self to ensure things happen as they do.
I go with Nathaniel Essex being the Dominion. His plan was to send out the four Essexes to specialize in one area….mutation, post-human evolution, the cosmic, and magic…until they had expert knowledge in each of their fields. Then, their minds will be combined to recreate the original Nathaniel Essex with the full knowledge of all four. Nathaniel Essex will become the Dominion. This Dominion representing the combination of the four, while excluding machine intelligence, will be greater than the other Dominions, allowing the machines to be defeated.
Paul > Kid Cable returns to try and take down Orchis and change history, but gets nowhere.
Duggan seems to have foreshadowed the return of Kid Cable two years ago. Cable 11 had a ‘Cable’s War Wagon Deployment Log’ data page. The 2021 entry, ‘Summers War’, referred to the events of Cable 11-12. The 2023 entry was redacted, but now in hindsight it was probably either ‘Hellfire Gala 2023’ or ‘Fall of X’. Kid Cable will likely be broken out of ORCHIS custody by the X-Men Year 3 team, and his story will continue there.
Cable 11 also had Old Man Cable give a marker to Magik saying that she’ll need it someday soon, so she’ll presumably cash it in during FoX.
RaoulSeagull > Rhyming gimmick got old pretty quickly and they already revealed he was just a guy in a big crocodile suit – but I guess he’s got Mysterium now?
Besides getting mysterium, Pogg now owes a favor to Forge, which is probably the real point of this scene. At some point during FoX, Forge will call in Pogg as the cavalry in the fight against ORCHIS.
Similarly, Broo and the Knowhere Brood (who owe their lives to Jean) will help fight ORCHIS at some point during FoX, showing that Scott was wrong about the Brood.
Paul > Jean talks to Polaris for some reason.
There’s probably two reasons for this scene:
(1) To follow up on how Magneto’s death from Judgment Day affected Polaris, as Jean has a close friendship with Lorna.
(2) To set up a new storyline for Polaris (potentially joining the Year 3 X-Men roster?). Jean had previously convinced Lorna to join the Year 1 roster.
In X-Men 19, when Forge and Monet were travelling through dimensions to Knowhere, they had a vision of Polaris moving a large asteroid, which I suspect is an upcoming event.
Paul > The kidnap of Manifold – which happened in Rogue and Gambit, a book that isn’t actually finished yet – is apparently a bigger deal than its positioning in that side series implied.
This was actually a storyline that began in Duggan’s X-Men. At the end of X-Men 12, Rogue said “Irene’s in a fit, saying that only I can ‘prevent mutants walking through a gate and never returning’ or some nonsense”. Destiny’s quest was why Rogue did not join the Year 2 X-Men roster. Their conversation in this issue is to recap and/or remind readers of the R&G plot before it becomes relevant during the Gala.
I suspect there wasn’t enough space for the Rogue-Gambit-Destiny plot in X-Men so it was spun off into it’s own miniseries. The same is probably true of the upcoming Children of the Vault miniseries, which I believe picks up where Duggan’s Vault trilogy left off and will move the CotV into a place where Duggan will continue from next year. I think the big endgame of Duggan’s X-Men is a worldwide X-Men vs CotV war.
In X-Men 9-10 and in Rogue & Gambit, Destiny was also trying to get Rogue to leave Gambit for her own good, which I believe foreshadows a downturn in their relationship in R&G 5.
Regarding Manifold’s importance, Duggan’s been dropping a number of hints:
– In X-Men 21, Nightmare tells Magik that her worst fear, which is presumably losing control of her powers, will come true soon.
– In X-Men 22, Omega Sentinel gets information on Krakoan gateways from Hordeculture.
– In X-Men 22, ORCHIS was constructing X-Sentinels out of Wolverine skeletons.
– In X-Men 23, Magik gets infected by nanosentinels through a cut from the Stark Sentinel.
– In X-Men 23, ORCHIS was constructing a private prison on Randall’s Island, to be completed in time for the Hellfire Gala.
Putting all of this together, ORCHIS plans to attack the Hellfire Gala with their X-Sentinels disguised as humans. The Krakoan gateways are rerouted so that the escaping mutants will end up in their private prison. With Nightcrawler gone and Magik’s powers compromised by nanosentinels, Destiny’s plan is to use Manifold to teleport as many mutants as possible to safety (probably to Planet Arakko).
This X-Men issue also has more foreshadowing for X-Men Year 3, courtesy of Destiny’s prophecies:
‘kings clashing in white, black’ > White King = Kingpin? Black King = Iron Man?
‘death of the Red Queen’ > Kate Pryde leaves the QC to be Shadowkat
‘Jovian bolt from the heavens’ > The return of the Brood from Knowhere
‘stars ripped in half’ > The return of Phoenix?
‘poisoning lies of the false captain’ > Captain Krakoa & his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
‘fool who speaks the truth’ > Young Cable?
Destiny also says there is a traitor among the X-Men, whom I assume is Talon, unknowingly compromised in some way by the CotV.
Speaking of the Year 3 X-Men roster, now that Jean appears to be leaving and Cyclops appears to be (at the very least) heavily injured during the Gala, I expect Jean’s mentee Synch will probably take over as leader. The surgery scene in X-Men 19 where Synch and Talon showed how well they now work together was probably foreshadowing this.
Synch (leader)
Talon (leader)
Shadowkat
X-Men Vote winner – Dazzler / Jubilee / Juggernaut / Cannonball / Frenzy / Prodigy
Forge?
Firestar?
Polaris?
Kid Cable?
Rasputin IV?
Fantomex?
@GN
Yeah, I guess they did really highlight the deal thing as well as the mysterium. The favour to Uranos in Judgment Day was a cool concept because he is set up to be the equivalent of a nuclear weapon, Pogg Ur-Pogg is just like a D-list villain, do we even know what his mutant ability is?
I did not really notice Gerry Duggan before the current volume of X-Men. Apparently he wrote considerable amounts of Guardians of the Galaxy related material previously.
For this volume, he seems to have a very specific mission: to write a certain form of entry-level X-Men book that at least tries to point readers towards the essentials of current storylines.
I find that both necessary and pointless, because these days the X-Books are not really written as separate series anymore. Instead, they combine traits of the Unlimited books of the 1990s with those of the annual event issues of the 1980s.
There are no true regular casts, and every single issue is a tie-in to the ongoing, often unnamed events that affect all current books. We are in permanent event mode without proper “central” event issues. Series are defined far more by writer and time period than by setup or characters now. That probably makes gauging the sales trends easier.
Many books lampshade this status quo with the use of text data pages, often with some amount of redacted material to emphasize that we are not getting the full story in any given issue and that the events and revelations are ongoing.
Duggan is trying to present a counterbalance to that demanding kind of book, but there is only so much that a single book can do to create accessibility when events are so complex and scattered.
“stars ripped in half’ > The return of Phoenix?”
Phoenix once ate a star, but Warlock’s dad Magus literally ripped one in half. He died off-panel, right?
‘fool who speaks the truth’= Sinister perhaps, as per the end of ‘Sins of Sinister’, where people ignore him when he’s actually pretty truthful?
And about Phoenix, not only has she been massively overused in the last twenty years, is she still Echo in Avengers, or was that undone at the end of Aaron’s run?
I’m reading John Byrne’s Fantastic Four run for the first time (read bits and pieces of it in the past), and Reed is also terrible there. He’s always been terrible.
People who say “the Fantastic Four is about family” have always been glaringly wrong.
The Fantastic Four is about a sociopath who torments and endangers those closest to him, forcing them to work together to fix his mistakes, and he is almost never held to account. It’s basically Doom Patrol with a superhero veneer.
@Loz Kid Cable was specifically connected to the Tarot card of The Fool in X of Swords. But of course the prophecyight turn out to be about anyone. Deadpool is x-affiliated these days again. Might be him.
As for Phoenix Echo, that’s over now, but I only know that because I’ve read Daredevil&Echo#1 when that dropped on Unlimited basically on day one of it coming out. No idea what happened in the latter… 75%… of the Aaron Avengers. Aavengers?
@GN I’d say that Armor’s a big contender for the 2023 roster. Voting option in 2021 and 22, so Duggan seems to have some ideas for her, but not on the 2023 ballot. We’ve seen Duggan make of vote losers before – Tempo in Marauders, Forge in X-Men after losing the 2021 vote, and then Monet/Penance in the Brood arc and Uncanny Avengers after losing in 2022.
More directly, Bishop: War College ends with a text page that all but announces that she’s making the new roster. Half that miniseries’ plot is basically pointless if that doesn’t get paid off, as it’s setting up that Armor’s ready for primetime.
Ms. Marvel’s the other strong possibility. We set up Cyclops’ grief at her death last issue, she’s back from the dead by #26, so she’s almost certainly coming back during the Gala. It would also be a good way to pay off Scott’s uncertainty about leaving the team with Jean. The conflict between Scott and Jean is basically about pragmatism vs. idealism, and I can see him deciding to cede his place on the team to the most idealistic, optimistic person imaginable. Alternately, he’s hurt or captured and Kamala steps up to replace her friend.
Anti-Reed sentiment here makes perfect sense, given Paul’s long-time ennui towards the FF over the life of the podcast.
If you say so… but I can’t figure how to reconcile that with posts about Wolverine, X-Force, Magneto and the like.
The Lee/Kirby era Reed was awful*, the post-Kirby Reed & Sue were both awful, the Byrne Reed was awful, and the Civil War-era Reed was awful. The Waid/Weiringo Reed (post-600) became depressed and distant, but I at least understood why. The Hickman Reed wasn’t the warmest guy in the issues I’ve read.
Reed was likable during the Walt Simonson run, in which he was the “‘50s science hero” without the misogyny. Then again, he was awful in the Simonson issues of Avengers around Avengers 300 (clashing with Steve Rogers over leadership!). Dwayne McDuffie wrote a repentant Teed trying to make up for his mistakes. Ditto Ryan North in the current run. Even when he’s not bad, he’s still not great.
* openly misogynist, callous, hostile, secretive, paternalistic; experimenting on his son in order to change him; neglectful of wife and kids
@Liis Dantas:
“If you say so… but I can’t figure how to reconcile that with posts about Wolverine, X-Force, Magneto and the like.”
Fair, but even those of us who like those characters and concepts criticize them on a regular basis. I find Magneto interesting, and his points of view compelling even though he’s been a murderer, terrorist, and supremicst. That doesn’t mean I agree with him, or hisactions. Reed Richards is certainly a more traditionally heroic character. He just sucks as a person.